HP Z840 36C/72T Workstation Build

[Storm-Chaser]

The computer is crashing if I enable hyper threading. And the BIOS throws up an error that something is wrong with L2 cache on CPU1. I've never seen anything like it. Its still 100% stable, I just cant enable HTing.

 

 

[ENTERPRISE]

10 hours ago, Storm-Chaser said:

due to the obscurity of this build I am doing quite well with hwbot submissions.

 

 

Ohhh, Nice !

[ENTERPRISE]

7 hours ago, Storm-Chaser said:

The computer is crashing if I enable hyper threading. And the BIOS throws up an error that something is wrong with L2 cache on CPU1. I've never seen anything like it. Its still 100% stable, I just cant enable HTing.

 

 

Did you not have HT enabled before then ? Possibly a CPU reseat is required.

[Storm-Chaser]

16 minutes ago, ENTERPRISE said:

Did you not have HT enabled before then ? Possibly a CPU reseat is required.

I will try that in the next couple days and report back.

[Storm-Chaser]

1 hour ago, ENTERPRISE said:

 

Ohhh, Nice !

 

Almost a clean sweep! Very productive day for me.

[Storm-Chaser]

55 minutes ago, ENTERPRISE said:

Did you not have HT enabled before then ?

Yes I did. It was working flawlessly until I ran a very mild AIDA64 torture test. Which is weird, because it had no problems passing prime or cpuz stress tests. 

[Storm-Chaser]

On 23/05/2022 at 14:05, ENTERPRISE said:

Did you not have HT enabled before then ? Possibly a CPU reseat is required.

I just re-seated the CPU this morning. I cleaned all the liquid metal off the surface and went back to regular thermal paste for now. No difference, it is still crashing on startup if I have hyperthreading enabled. After it crashes, the system will reboot and I will get this error (from the z840 system alerting):

 

929-Fatal MCA error

    Core 0 generic L2  cache generic error - poisoned data

CPU: 1

Status: 0xFE20000000000C110A

Misc: 0x0000000000000000

Address: 0x0000000000000000

Press ENTER to continue

 

 People say this could be a memory issue, but I have spare memory and swapped that in and it made no difference. Reason I am thinking its more CPU related and not memory is because the intial problem happened when I started running an AIDA64 torture test. So it crashed under that load and I was never able to use hyperthreading again. 

 

Not the end of the world  I still have 36 cores to throw into the mix lol

Also, I can upgrade to v4 processors at some point if I can narrow this problem down and say definitively it needs a CPU.

[ENTERPRISE]

That is certainly not a common thing. I have not had nor heard of Cache being damaged during stress testing. Hopefully its just a CPU issue that will be easily solved with a swap out.  

 

I have a replacement CPU fan assembly coming today. The one I had was tempramental and would run full speed at times.

[Storm-Chaser]

14 hours ago, ENTERPRISE said:

That is certainly not a common thing. I have not had nor heard of Cache being damaged during stress testing. Hopefully its just a CPU issue that will be easily solved with a swap out.  

 

I have a replacement CPU fan assembly coming today. The one I had was tempramental and would run full speed at times.

a common problem with the z820/z840 heatsink shroud. The fan connection where it plugs into the motherboard has two little feet on it. Common to have it slip out and not make a full connection.  In that case, the fans will run at full throttle until the proper connection is made. Most of the time, you just slip the two feet back into position and you're good to go. Other times, the feet can be broken, which will not allow for a good connection. 

[Storm-Chaser]

14 hours ago, ENTERPRISE said:

That is certainly not a common thing. I have not had nor heard of Cache being damaged during stress testing. Hopefully its just a CPU issue that will be easily solved with a swap out.  

 

I have a replacement CPU fan assembly coming today. The one I had was tempramental and would run full speed at times.

Last thing I can do is swap CPU #1 and CPU #0 around and see if the error follows CPU#0...

[Storm-Chaser]

14 hours ago, ENTERPRISE said:

That is certainly not a common thing.

Because this failure mode is so rare, I hate to think that perhaps it's the motherboard that's causing these problems. We'll know soon enough.

 

How do you like your new rig?

[ENTERPRISE]

15 hours ago, Storm-Chaser said:

a common problem with the z820/z840 heatsink shroud. The fan connection where it plugs into the motherboard has two little feet on it. Common to have it slip out and not make a full connection.  In that case, the fans will run at full throttle until the proper connection is made. Most of the time, you just slip the two feet back into position and you're good to go. Other times, the feet can be broken, which will not allow for a good connection. 

 

Are these two little feet on the shroud assembly? 

 

15 hours ago, Storm-Chaser said:

Because this failure mode is so rare, I hate to think that perhaps it's the motherboard that's causing these problems. We'll know soon enough.

 

How do you like your new rig?

 

I have not got to set it up just yet. Long story short, I was not happy with the fan assembly I had, it always felt sort of loose when put into place. So I had to do a swap with the company who sent me a replacement unit. However to my frustration, the unit they sent did not have the second CPU fan.....D'oh. So now they are shipping me a second fan for me to put into the unit. After that I should be good to go....Fingers crossed.

[Storm-Chaser]

6 hours ago, ENTERPRISE said:

 

Are these two little feet on the shroud assembly? 

 

 

I have not got to set it up just yet. Long story short, I was not happy with the fan assembly I had, it always felt sort of loose when put into place. So I had to do a swap with the company who sent me a replacement unit. However to my frustration, the unit they sent did not have the second CPU fan.....D'oh. So now they are shipping me a second fan for me to put into the unit. After that I should be good to go....Fingers crossed.

The cooling shroud connection is circled below. Once you take a look at that closely, you will see what I'm talking about when I mention the two little feet that keep it in place. I have used JB quick weld or tape to keep this in place,  Another common problem with the CPU shroud is that since the entire case is tool less, people neglect to take the GPU cover off first and THEN the CPU shroud. The order of operation is important because if you try to remove the CPU part first you can release some of the clips that keep the two halves of it together (yes, the top cover can be removed separately) and as a result the entire shroud will feel like it's about to come a part. This normally don't break, so in most cases you can just pop the top cover back into place and that should tighten everything up.

 

[ENTERPRISE]

3 hours ago, Storm-Chaser said:

The cooling shroud connection is circled below. Once you take a look at that closely, you will see what I'm talking about when I mention the two little feet that keep it in place. I have used JB quick weld or tape to keep this in place,  Another common problem with the CPU shroud is that since the entire case is tool less, people neglect to take the GPU cover off first and THEN the CPU shroud. The order of operation is important because if you try to remove the CPU part first you can release some of the clips that keep the two halves of it together (yes, the top cover can be removed separately) and as a result the entire shroud will feel like it's about to come a part. This normally don't break, so in most cases you can just pop the top cover back into place and that should tighten everything up.

 

Thanks, I think I know exactly what you mean now, even without looking at my cooler. Will keep it in mind. 

 

This one certainly fits a lot more snug in place as I would expect it to, so thats good news. I have the second CPU fan coming on Saturday. 

 

By the way, on your cooler, do both of your fans have grills in front of them ? 

[Storm-Chaser]

13 minutes ago, ENTERPRISE said:

Thanks, I think I know exactly what you mean now, even without looking at my cooler. Will keep it in mind. 

 

This one certainly fits a lot more snug in place as I would expect it to, so thats good news. I have the second CPU fan coming on Saturday. 

 

By the way, on your cooler, do both of your fans have grills in front of them ? 

No just one fan has a grill.

[Storm-Chaser]

Well, the novabench comp over at overclock.net has inspired me to do a little bit more upgrading to this machine since it's already close in horsepower to a 12900K or 5950X. And now that I resolved the hyperthreading issue with an OS re-image, there is nothing holding me back.

 

Since I already have 2400MHz memory in this Z840, I figured I would upgrade to E5-2600 v4 series chips to capitalize on that. The memory speed limitation on v3 chips is 2133MHz (which is what I have in it right now).

 

I will be going from two 18 core E5-2696v3 to two 22 core E5-2696v4 chips. 22nm to 14nm (Broadwell)

 

 

 

Stay tuned. I will be ordering these around the first of November. Benchmarks to follow!

 

Hoping to hit around 130GB/s memory read - which should be good enough for a top 5 finish at hwbot.org

 

 

 

 

Edited October 20, 2022 by Storm-Chaser

[ENTERPRISE]

7 hours ago, Storm-Chaser said:

Well, the novabench comp over at overclock.net has inspired me to do a little bit more upgrading to this machine since it's already close in horsepower to a 12900K or 5950X. And now that I resolved the hyperthreading issue with an OS re-image, there is nothing holding me back.

 

Since I already have 2400MHz memory in this Z840, I figured I would upgrade to E5-2600 v4 series chips to capitalize on that. The memory speed limitation on v3 chips is 2133MHz (which is what I have in it right now).

 

I will be going from two 18 core E5-2696v3 to two 22 core E5-2696v4 chips. 22nm to 14nm (Broadwell)

 

 

 

Stay tuned. I will be ordering these around the first of November. Benchmarks to follow!

 

Hoping to hit around 130GB/s memory read - which should be good enough for a top 5 finish at hwbot.org

 

 

 

 

I look forward to the benches bud. It will be a similar config to mine after your upgrade. I never really benched it as it started serving my NAS immediately.

[Storm-Chaser]

Some benchmarks from the new processors!

 

 

 

[Storm-Chaser]

@ENTERPRISE

 

I will post a number of benchmarks here as well, but for more details go to overclock.net, I've started a thread over there for recording benchmark performance.

 

Just a moment...

WWW.OVERCLOCK.NET

 

[ENTERPRISE]

3 hours ago, Storm-Chaser said:

@ENTERPRISE

 

I will post a number of benchmarks here as well, but for more details go to overclock.net, I've started a thread over there for recording benchmark performance.

 

Just a moment...

WWW.OVERCLOCK.NET

 

To those be some nice numbers. I didn't think our system config would be as competitive against the newer gen hardware, even with it being the top end of its time.

[Storm-Chaser]

Also looking very good in CPUz benchmark.

 

 

 

 

Memory:

 

 

 

 

 

Edited November 7, 2022 by Storm-Chaser

[ENTERPRISE]

On 07/11/2022 at 01:58, Storm-Chaser said:

Also looking very good in CPUz benchmark.

 

 

 

 

Memory:

 

 

 

 

 

Nice, almost makes me want to get one for Windows rig lol. But ultimately my main rig is fine. That being said it makes for a decent power rig in the cheap.